
oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and Homer with establishing Greek religious customs. Modern scholars refer to him as a major source on Greek mythology
, farming techniques, early economic thought
(he is sometimes identified as the first economist), archaic Greek astronomy
and ancient time
-keeping.
The dating of his life is a contested issue in scholarly circles and it is covered below in Hesiod#Dating.
Epic narrative allowed poets like Homer no opportunity for personal revelations but Hesiod's extant work comprises didactic poems and here he went out of his way to let his audience in on a few details of his life, including three explicit references in Works and Days, as well as some passages in his Theogony that support inferences.
Love, who is most beautiful among the immortal gods, the melter of limbs, overwhelms in their hearts the intelligence and wise counsel of all gods and all men.
There was not after all a single kind of strife, but on earth there are two kinds: one of them a man might praise when he recognized her, but the other is blameworthy.
Potter bears a grudge against potter, and craftsman against craftsman, and beggar is envious of beggar, and bard of bard.
Fools, they do not even know how much more is the half than the whole.
Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.
He harms himself who does harm to another, and the evil plan is most harmful to the planner.
Badness you can get easily, in quantity: the road is smooth, and it lies close by. But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it, and rough at first. But when you come to the top, then it is easy, even though it is hard.
A bad neighbor is a misfortune, as much as a good one is a great blessing.
Do not seek evil gains; evil gains are the equivalent of disaster.
If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big.
oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and Homer with establishing Greek religious customs. Modern scholars refer to him as a major source on Greek mythology
, farming techniques, early economic thought
(he is sometimes identified as the first economist), archaic Greek astronomy
and ancient time
-keeping.
Life
The dating of his life is a contested issue in scholarly circles and it is covered below in Hesiod#Dating.Epic narrative allowed poets like Homer no opportunity for personal revelations but Hesiod's extant work comprises didactic poems and here he went out of his way to let his audience in on a few details of his life, including three explicit references in Works and Days, as well as some passages in his Theogony that support inferences. We learn in the former poem that his father came from Cyme
in Aeolis
(on the coast of Asia Minor, a little south of the island Lesbos), and crossed the sea to settle at a hamlet, near Thespiae
in Boeotia
, named Ascra, "a cursed place, cruel in winter, hard in summer, never pleasant" (Works, l. 640). Hesiod's patrimony there, a small piece of ground at the foot of Mount Helicon, occasioned lawsuits with his brother Perses
, who seems at first to have cheated him of his rightful share thanks to corrupt authorities or 'kings' but later became impoverished and ended up scrounging on the thrifty poet (Works l. 35, 396). Unlike their father, Hesiod was averse to sea travel but he once crossed the narrow strait between the Greek mainland and Euboea
to participate in funeral celebrations for one Athamas of Chalcis
, where he won a tripod in a singing competition. He also describes a meeting between himself and the Muses on Mount Helicon, where he had been pasturing sheep when the goddesses presented him with a laurel staff, a symbol of poetic authority (Theogony, ll. 22-35) Fanciful though it might seem, the account has led ancient and modern scholars to infer that he did not play the lyre, or that he was not professionally trained, otherwise he would have been presented with a lyre instead.See discussion by M.L. West, Hesiod: Theogony, Oxford University Press (1966), pages 163-4 note 30, citing for example Pausanias 9.30.3. Rhapsodes in post-Homeric times are often shown carrying either a laurel staff or a lyre but in Hesiod's earlier time the staff seems to indicate that he was not a rhapsode i.e. he was not a professional minstrel. Meetings between poets and the Muses became part of poetic folklorecompare for example Archilochus
's account of his meeting the Muses while leading home a cow, and also the legend of Cædmon
.
Some scholars have seen Perses
as a literary creation, a foil for the moralizing that Hesiod develops in Works and Days, but in the introduction to his translation of Hesiod's works, Hugh G. Evelyn-White provides several arguments against this theory. Gregory Nagy
, on the other hand, sees both Persēs ("the destroyer": / perthō) and Hēsiodos ("he who emits the voice:" / hiēmi + / audē) as fictitious names for poetical persona
e. It is quite common for works of moral instruction to have an imaginative setting, as a means of getting the audience's attention,Jasper Griffin, in The Oxford History of the Classical World, O.U.P (1986), cites for example the Book Of Ecclesiastes, a Sumerian text in the form of a father's remonstrance with a prodigal son, and Egyptian wisdom texts spoken by viziers etc. Hesiod was certainly open to Oriental influences, as is clear in the myths presented by him in Theogony but it is difficult to see how Hesiod could have travelled the countryside entertaining people with a narrative about himself if the account was known to be fictitious.
It might seem unusual that Hesiod's father migrated from Asia Minor westwards to mainland Greece, the opposite direction to most colonial movements at the time, and Hesiod himself gives no explanation for it. However around 750 BC, or a little later, there was a migration of sea-going merchants from his original home in Cyme in Asia Minor to Cumae
in Campania
(a colony they shared with Euboeans), and possibly his move west had something to do with that, since Euboea
is not far from Boetia, where he eventually established himself and his family.
In spite of Hesiod's complaints about poverty, life on his father's farm can't have been too uncomfortable if Works and Days is anything to judge by, since he describes the routines of prosperous yeomanry
rather than peasants. His farmer employs a friend (l. 370) as well as servants (ll. 502, 573, 597, 608, 766), an energetic and responsible ploughman of mature years (ll. 469-71), a slave boy to cover the seed (ll. 441-6), a female servant to keep house (ll. 405, 602) and working teams of oxen and mules (ll. 405, 607f.). One modern scholar surmises that Hesiod may have learned about world geography, especially the catalogue of rivers in Theogony (ll. 337-45), listening to his father's accounts of his own sea voyages as a merchant The father probably spoke in the Aeolian dialect of Cyme but Hesiod probably grew up speaking the local Boeotian dialect. However, while his poetry features some Aeolisms there are no words that are certainly Boeotianhe composed in the main literary dialect of the time (Homer's dialect): Ionian.
It is probable that Hesiod wrote his poems down, or dictated them, rather than passed them on orally, as rhapsodes didotherwise the pronounced personality that now emerges from the poems would surely have been diluted through oral transmission from one rhapsode to another. If he did write or dictate, it was perhaps as an aid to memory or because he lacked confidence in his ability to produce poems extempore, as trained rhapsodes could do. It certainly wasn't in a quest for immortal fame since poets in his era had no such notions. However, some scholars suspect the presence of large-scale changes in the text and attribute this to oral transmission. The personality behind the poems is not capable of the "aristocratic withdrawal" typical of a rhapsode but is "argumentative, suspicious, ironically humorous, frugal, fond of proverbs, wary of women." He was in fact a misogynist of the same calibre as the later poet, Semonides. He resembles Solon
in his preoccupation with issues of good versus evil and "how a just and all-powerful god can allow the unjust to flourish in this life". He resembles Aristophanes
in his rejection of the idealised hero of epic literature in favour of an idealised view of the farmer. Yet the fact that he could eulogise kings in Theogony (ll. 80ff, 430, 434) and denounce them as corrupt in Works and Days suggests that he could resemble whichever audience he composed for.
Various legends accumulated about Hesiod and they are recorded in several sources:
- the story "The poetic contest ( / Agōn) of Homer and Hesiod;"
- a vitaBiographyA biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...
of Hesiod by the Byzantine grammarian John TzetzesJohn TzetzesJohn Tzetzes was a Byzantine poet and grammarian, known to have lived at Constantinople during the 12th century.Tzetzes was Georgian on his mother's side...
; - the entry for Hesiod in the SudaSudaThe Suda or Souda is a massive 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, formerly attributed to an author called Suidas. It is an encyclopedic lexicon, written in Greek, with 30,000 entries, many drawing from ancient sources that have since been lost, and often...
; - two passages and some scattered remarks in PausaniasPausanias (geographer)Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer of the 2nd century AD, who lived in the times of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. He is famous for his Description of Greece , a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from firsthand observations, and is a crucial link between classical...
(IX, 31.3–6 and 38.3–4); - a passage in PlutarchPlutarchPlutarch then named, on his becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. 46 – 120 AD, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia...
Moralia (162b).
Two different—yet early—traditions record the site of Hesiod's grave. One, as early as Thucydides
, reported in Plutarch, the Suda
and John Tzetzes
, states that the Delphic oracle
warned Hesiod that he would die in Nemea, and so he fled to Locris
, where he was killed at the local temple to Nemean Zeus, and buried there. This tradition follows a familiar ironic
convention: the oracle that predicts accurately after all. The other tradition, first mentioned in an epigram
by Chersias of Orchomenus
written in the 7th century BC (within a century or so of Hesiod's death) claims that Hesiod lies buried at Orchomenus, a town in Boeotia. According to Aristotle
's Constitution of Orchomenus, when the Thespian
s ravaged Ascra, the villagers sought refuge at Orchomenus, where, following the advice of an oracle, they collected the ashes of Hesiod and set them in a place of honour in their agora
, next to the tomb of Minyas
, their eponymous founder. Eventually they came to regard Hesiod too as their "hearth-founder" ( / oikistēs). Later writers attempted to harmonize these two accounts.
Dating
Since at least Herodotus's time (Histories, 2.53), Hesiod and Homer
have generally been considered the earliest Greek poets whose work has survived, and they are often paired. Scholars disagree about who lived first, and the fourth-century BC sophist Alcidamas
' Mouseion even brought them together in an imagined poetic agon, the Contest of Homer and Hesiod
. Aristarchus
first argued for Homer's priority, a claim that was generally accepted by later antiquity.
Hesiod mentions a poetry contest at Chalcis
in Euboea
where the sons of one Amphidamas awarded him a tripod (Works and Days ll.654-662). Plutarch
first cited this passage as an interpolation into Hesiod's original work, based on his identification of Amphidamas with the hero of the Lelantine War
between Chalcis and Eretria
, which occurred around 705 BC. Plutarch assumed this date much too late for a contemporary of Homer, but most Homeric academics would now accept it.
Works
J. A. Symondswrites that "Hesiod is also the immediate parent of gnomic verse, and the ancestor of those deep thinkers who speculated in the Attic Age upon the mysteries of human life."
A handful of scholars have doubted whether Hesiod alone conceived and wrote the poems attributed to him. For example, Symonds writes that "the first ten verses of the Works and Days are spurious—borrowed probably from some Orphic hymn to Zeus and recognised as not the work of Hesiod by critics as ancient as Pausanias
."
Of the many works attributed to Hesiod, three survive complete and many more in fragmentary state. Our witnesses include papyri
, one dating from as early as the 3rd century BC, and manuscripts written from the tenth century forward. Demetrius Chalcondyles
issued the first printed edition (editio princeps
) of Works and Days, possibly at Milan, probably in 1493. In 1495 Aldus Manutius
published the complete works at Venice.
Hesiod's works, especially Works and Days, are from the view of the small independent farmer, while Homer's view is from nobility or the rich. Even with these differences, they share some beliefs regarding work ethic, justice, and consideration of material items.
Some (e.g. A. D. Momigliano) have detected a proto-historical perspective in Hesiod. This is rejected by Paul Cartledge
as Hesiod advocates a not-forgetting without any attempt at verification.
Works and Days
Hesiod wrote a poem of some 800 verses, the Works and Days, which revolves around two general truths: labour is the universal lot of Man, but he who is willing to work will get by. Scholars have interpreted this work against a background of agrarian crisis in mainland Greece, which inspired a wave of documented colonisations in search of new land. This poem is one of the earliest known musings on economic thought.
This work lays out the five Ages of Man
, as well as containing advice and wisdom, prescribing a life of honest labour and attacking idleness and unjust judge
s (like those who decided in favour of Perses
) as well as the practice of usury. It describes immortals who roam the earth watching over justice and injustice. The poem regards labor as the source of all good, in that both gods and men hate the idle, who resemble drones
in a hive.
Theogony
The Theogony, a poem which uses the same epic verse-form as the Works and Days, is also attributed to Hesiod. Despite the different subject matter, most scholars, with some notable exceptions (like Evelyn-White), believe that the two works were written by the same man. As M.L. West writes, "Both bear the marks of a distinct personality: a surly, conservative countryman, given to reflection, no lover of women or life, who felt the gods' presence heavy about him."The Theogony concerns the origins of the world (cosmogony
) and of the gods (theogony
), beginning with Chaos
, Gaia
, and Eros, and shows a special interest in genealogy
. Embedded in Greek myth
, there remain fragments of quite variant tales, hinting at the rich variety of myth that once existed, city by city; but Hesiod's retelling of the old stories became, according to the fifth-century historian Herodotus
, the accepted version that linked all Hellenes
.
The creation myth in Hesiod has long been held to have Eastern influences, such as the Hittite
Song of Kumarbi and the Babylon
ian Enuma Elis. This cultural crossover would have occurred in the eighth and ninth century Greek trading colonies such as Al Mina
in North Syria. (For more discussion, read Robin Lane Fox's Travelling Heroes and Walcot's Hesiod and the Near East.)
Other writings
A short poem traditionally no longer attributed to Hesiod is The Shield of Heracles( / Aspis Hērakleous). This survives complete; the other works discussed in this section survive only in quotations or papyrus copies which are often damaged.
Classical authors also attributed to Hesiod a lengthy genealogical poem known as Catalogue of Women
or Ehoiai (because sections began with the Greek words ē hoiē, "Or like the one who ..."). It was a mythological catalogue of the mortal women who had mated with gods, and of the offspring and descendants of these unions.
Several additional hexameter poems were ascribed to Hesiod:
- Aegimius, a heroic epic concerning the Dorian AegimiusAegimiusAegimius was the Greek mythological ancestor of the Dorians, who is described as their king and lawgiver at the time when they were yet inhabiting the northern parts of Thessaly. He asked Heracles for help in a war against the Lapiths and, in gratitude, offered him one-third of his kingdom...
(variously attributed to Hesiod or Cercops of Miletus). - Astronomia, an astronomical poem to which Callimachus (Ep. 27) apparently compared AratusAratusAratus was a Greek didactic poet. He is best known today for being quoted in the New Testament. His major extant work is his hexameter poem Phaenomena , the first half of which is a verse setting of a lost work of the same name by Eudoxus of Cnidus. It describes the constellations and other...
' Phaenomena. - Precepts of Chiron, a didactic work that presented the teaching of ChironChironIn Greek mythology, Chiron was held to be the superlative centaur among his brethren.-History:Like the satyrs, centaurs were notorious for being wild and lusty, overly indulgent drinkers and carousers, given to violence when intoxicated, and generally uncultured delinquents...
as delivered to the young AchillesAchillesIn Greek mythology, Achilles was a Greek hero of the Trojan War, the central character and the greatest warrior of Homer's Iliad.Plato named Achilles the handsomest of the heroes assembled against Troy....
. - Idaean Dactyls, a work concerning mythological smelters, the Idaean DactylsDactyl (mythology)In Greek mythology, the Dactyls were the archaic mythical race of small phallic male beings associated with the Great Mother, whether as Cybele or Rhea. Their numbers vary, but often they were ten spirit-men so like the three Curetes, the Cabiri or the Korybantes that they were often interchangeable...
. - Wedding of CeyxWedding of CeyxThe Wedding of Ceyx is a fragmentary Ancient Greek hexameter poem that was attributed to Hesiod during antiquity. The fragments that survive imply that the subject of the poem was not simply the wedding of a certain Ceyx, but Heracles' arrival at, and involvement in, the festivities...
, a poem concerning Heracles' attendance at the wedding of a certain Ceyx—noted for its riddles. - Great Works, a poem similar to the Works and Days, but presumably longer
- Great Eoiae, a poem similar to the Catalogue of Women, but presumably longer.
- Melampodia, a genealogical poem that treats of the families of, and myths associated with, the great seers of mythology.
- Ornithomantia, a work on bird omens that followed the Works and Days.
Scholars generally classify all these as later examples of the poetic tradition to which Hesiod belonged, not as the work of Hesiod himself. The Shield, in particular, appears to be an expansion of one of the genealogical poems, taking its cue from Homer's description of the Shield of Achilles
.
"Portrait" Bust

, the so-called Pseudo-Seneca
, was first reidentified by Gisela Richter
as a fictitious portrait meant for Hesiod, though it had been recognized that the bust was not in fact Seneca since 1813, when an inscribed herma
portrait with quite different features was discovered. Most scholars now follow her identification.Gisela Richter (1965). The Portraits of the Greeks. London: Phaidon, I, 58ff; commentators agreeing with Richter include Wolfram Prinz, 1973. "The Four Philosophers by Rubens and the Pseudo-Seneca in Seventeenth-Century Painting" The Art Bulletin 55.3 (September 1973), pp. 410-428. "...one feels that it may just as well have been the Greek writer Hesiod..." and Martin Robertson, in his review of G. Richter, The Portraits of the Greeks for The Burlington Magazine 108.756 (March 1966), pp 148-150. "...with Miss Richter, I accept the identification as Hesiod"
Further reading
- J.P. Barron and P.E.Easterling, 'Hesiod' in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Greek Literature, P. Easterling and B. Knox (eds), Cambridge University Press (1985)
- M.L. West, Hesiod: Theogony, Oxford University Press (1966)
- Jasper Griffin, 'Greek Myth and Hesiod' in The Oxford History of the Classical World, J.Boardman, J.Griffin and O.Murray (eds), Oxford University Press (1986)
- Antony Andrewes, Greek Society, Pelican Books (1971)
Selected translations
- George ChapmanGeorge ChapmanGeorge Chapman was an English dramatist, translator, and poet. He was a classical scholar, and his work shows the influence of Stoicism. Chapman has been identified as the Rival Poet of Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Minto, and as an anticipator of the Metaphysical Poets...
, The Works of Hesiod, London, 1618, dedicated to Sir Francis Bacon. - Cooke, Hesiod, Works and Days, Translated from the Greek, London, 1728
- Sinclair, Thomas Alan (translator), Hesiodou Erga kai hemerai, London, Macmillan and co., 1932.
- West, Martin LitchfieldMartin Litchfield WestMartin Litchfield West is an internationally recognised scholar in classics, classical antiquity and philology...
(translator), Hesiod Works & Days, Oxford University PressOxford University PressOxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
, 1978, ISBN 0-19-814005-3. Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary. - Athanassakis, Apostolos N.Apostolos AthanassakisApostolos N. Athanassakis is a classical scholar and Argyropoulos Chair in Hellenic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara . Professor Athanassakis, or "Professor A" as he is often referred to by students, currently serves as the faculty in residence in Manzanita Village....
, Theogony; Works and days; Shield / Hesiod; introduction, translation, and notes, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University PressJohns Hopkins University PressThe Johns Hopkins University Press is the publishing division of the Johns Hopkins University. It was founded in 1878 and holds the distinction of being the oldest continuously running university press in the United States. The Press publishes books, journals, and electronic databases...
, 1983. ISBN 0801829984 - Frazer, R.M. (Richard McIlwaine), The Poems of Hesiod, Norman: University of Oklahoma PressUniversity of Oklahoma PressThe University of Oklahoma Press is the publishing arm of the University of Oklahoma. It has been in operation for over seventy-five years, and was the first university press established in the American Southwest. It was founded by William Bennett Bizzell, the fifth president of the University of...
, 1983. ISBN 0806118377 - Tandy, David W., and Neale, Walter C. [translators], Works and Days: a translation and commentary for the social sciences, Berkeley: University of California PressUniversity of California PressUniversity of California Press, also known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish books and papers for the faculty of the University of California, established 25 years earlier in 1868...
, 1996. ISBN 0520203836 - Schlegel, Catherine M., and Henry Weinfield, translators, Theogony and Works and Days, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2006
- Most, GlennGlenn W. MostGlenn Warren Most is a classicist and comparatist originating from the US, but also working in Germany and Italy.Most studied classics at Harvard from 1968 on and received a B.A. Summa Cum Laude in Classics in 1972...
, translator, Hesiod, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2006-07.
External links
- Hesiod, Works and Days Book 1 Works and Days Book 2 Works and Days Book 3 Translated from the Greek by Mr. Cooke (London, 1728). A youthful exercise in Augustan heroic couplets by Thomas Cooke (1703–1756), employing the Roman names for all the gods.
- Web texts taken from Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica, edited and translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, published as Loeb Classical LibraryLoeb Classical LibraryThe Loeb Classical Library is a series of books, today published by Harvard University Press, which presents important works of ancient Greek and Latin Literature in a way designed to make the text accessible to the broadest possible audience, by presenting the original Greek or Latin text on each...
#57, 1914, ISBN 0-674-99063-3:- Scanned text at the Internet Archive, in PDFPortable Document FormatPortable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems....
and DjVuDjVuDjVu is a computer file format designed primarily to store scanned documents, especially those containing a combination of text, line drawings, and photographs. It uses technologies such as image layer separation of text and background/images, progressive loading, arithmetic coding, and lossy...
format - Perseus Classics Collection: Greek and Roman Materials: Text: Hesiod (Greek texts and English translations for Works and Days, TheogonyTheogonyThe Theogony is a poem by Hesiod describing the origins and genealogies of the gods of the ancient Greeks, composed circa 700 BC...
, and Shield of Heracles with additional notes and cross links.) - Versions of the electronic edition of Evelyn-White's English translation edited by Douglas B. Killings, June 1995:
- Scanned text at the Internet Archive, in PDF